Returning soldiers from ‘Nam were a big part of both violent black and white nationalist movements in the ’70s and ’80s. Really, the pullout from Vietnam and the transition to an all-volunteer military afterwards was in part because the command structure was disintegrating with insubordination bordering on insurrection with the “fragging” execution of officers by enlisted in a way that was highly racialized, and even if losing South Vietnam to the communists looked like it could be the first domino, losing the US Army to race war looked even worse.

Reaganite escalation in South America, in addition to keeping the Western Hemisphere an American preserve in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, was partly an attempt to keep those quality officers that remained happy by giving them a chance to play with all the toys they’d finally developed to win Vietnam - the teen series fighters, look-down radar and aerial SIGINT to interdict jungle supply routes, SOCOM teams traipsing through the jungle and setting up local militia fiefdoms.

The Drug War under Reagan was largely cover for this, like Iran-Contra an attempt to endrun Watergate class congressmen controlling funding. Under Clinton it was maintained in part to keep the deep state occupied after the Cold War. Bush the elder came from the deep state, and had more leverage, but with BRAC and drawdowns and “streamlining government”, there was a real danger that the people who had been trained to infiltrate and destabilize governments would turn inwards to protect their funding streams.

Vince Foster DID commit suicide, but I guarantee you that he was being blackmailed as part of interdepartmental scraps. Waco happened because the BATF tried to tap into the same zeitgeist that gave us “cult deprogramming” and satanic abuse witch hunts and add anti-heresy inquisition to their portfolio, because the FBI was muscling in on their territory, because the CIA was muscling in on *their* counterespionage/counterterrorist territory, because without the Reds they needed a mission to preserve their funding and institutional structure.